Bio Prof Janzen garners 'Japanese Nobel Prize' for conservation work

Professor Dan Janzen said he will use the $430,000 award to endow Costa Rica's Guanecaste conservation reserve. Every spring, Biology Professor Dan Janzen trades in his high-tech Leidy Laboratory office for an isolated tin-roofed cabin in the Central American wilderness in order to engage in some "muddy-your-boots" biology. His self-described "user-friendly" approach to conservation biology has recently gained him international attention. This year, he garnered Japan's coveted Kyota Prize in Basic Sciences, a "Japanese Nobel Prize" of approximately $430,000 that is awarded every three years. Janzen said he plans to use his winnings to set up an endowment for the Guanecaste conservation reserve in Costa Rica. A technical advisor to the reserve, Janzen began effectively rebuilding the tropical dry forest after a gold-mining invasion in the early 1980s disrupted the area's biodiversity. Miners feel "morally legitimate" in exploiting a national park without an owner, Janzen said. "In order to avoid invasion, you must give the park a presence." Janzen and his wife, Winifred Hallwachs, took a practical approach to transforming the park into "society's farm," an area generating income for society while being protected from hunting, overgrazing and fires. He cited questions over the future of Yellowstone National Park as an example of the controversy surrounding the best way to preserve a natural environment -- should the park remain "an untouchable picture on the wall" in need of preservation, or should it "encourage" constructive human activity? He compared this "look but not touch" view of nature to a library's rare book section. "A library can only tolerate so many rare book sections before the city stops footing the bill," he said. "You must try to maximize use of a public reading room, without letting people razor-blade books." By offering the public access into national parks, the price of admission subsidizes food, transportation and wages, all vital elements to the daily operations of a reserve, Janzen said. "Tourists are a better kind of cow," he added. If an "ecotourist" finds refuge in a forest, then an environmentally-aware student finds comfort in Janzen's classroom. "Society has spent 100,000 years or longer trying to clobber nature," he said. "Your genes say, 'If it's wild, it's bad'. Students must understand this." But while Janzen focuses on plant and animal interactions in the hundreds of scientific journal articles he has published, in the classroom he discusses the economic and social implications of the "use it or lose it" mentality. "By destroying nature, you are removing the stimuli for a lot of your senses," he explained. "We don't want to live in a black-and-white world of human constructs. By removing wildlife, you are removing the complexity of nature -- the stuff that moves." Janzen attributed the public's detachment from nature over the past 50 years to society's shift from an agrarian to an urban lifestyle, although he said "the pendulum is finally swinging back." And since the field is expanding and becoming more visible, Janzen said he is optimistic for the future. "If I didn't think it was going to work, I wouldn't be trying it," he said. Biology Department Chairperson Andy Binns said Janzen's dedication and devotion qualify him as one of the top three conservation biologists in the world. "He doesn't seem to need to relax, Binns said. "He can attend a molecular biology lecture and tag butterflies at the same time, and he still asks the best question at the end of the lecture." Janzen earned the University's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1985 and two years later received an award for the Improvement of Costa Rican Quality of Life, proving that he is capable of balancing the demands of academia and field research. But he stressed that one overlying theme governs both aspects of his research. "If humanity allows the wild world to be eliminated, then they've culturally deprived themselves very severely," he said.

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